THE LADIES OF 13th AND POE

CIT WITNESS VERIFICATION PART II: THE LADIES OF 13th AND POE
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud
February 3 2008
update 2/11 2am

Note: Thanks to LCF member bileduct for starting me seeing these patterns. This here is the “Convoluted manipulative disinfo” version of the article, which explains all my points adequately. For those with less patience, see also my “despicable scumbag” summary version.

Northern Redezvous / Southern Anchor
Craig Ranke, the argumentative co-founder of Citizen Investigation Team (CIT) announced back on December 10 2007 the release of their new video "Flight 77" The White Plane: “CIT further exposes the mainstream media cover-up with this extremely important new 37 minute short revealing what the people of Arlington REALLY saw on 9/11.” [source] Their early 2007 video The PentaCon had already set the damning flight path from the Pentagon, north of the Citgo, and back to the Navy Annex (see graphic below). This follow up is centered on four witnesses further back along the flight path, and their main finding, as the title implies, is that “the plane people saw tree top level over Arlington timed perfectly with the explosion at the Pentagon was white.” They speak of a “media cover-up of this white jet” to be confused with and erased by the E4B that circled the capitol shortly afterwards. [source] The PentaCon witnesses had disagreed on the color but that didn’t matter; it was all about the flight path then. Now that four people used the word 'white,' this is reported as the most significant aspect and the flight path clues are ignored. For this reason I will first, in this piece, ignore the color issue and focus on what CIT has downplayed – what the plane was remembere to have actually done with its whiteness, according to these witnesses.

This new eyewitness data, in addition to the old, gave CIT as an inescapable reality this yellow swerve (red labels and arrows mine), what Craig has elsewhere described as “the flight path that has been getting established for us by the people of Arlington.” While the curves are extreme for an aircraft that size, I’d guess this path is entirely possible for a 757. However I cannot visualize it happening without two very sharp turns with accompanying steep wing banks - one turn left, with right wing pointed up towards the sun, a rapid leveling and straightening on a more northerly heading, then an even sharper turn to the right, during which its right wing would need to be dipped quite low over the Navy Annex. Keep this in mind when looking at this as it has been re-created in the graphics below, yellow each time. The southern portion of this path, from the Navy Annex down, is what The White Plane and its witnesses are said to illustrate.

Here is the video itself for reference: If you want to watch the whole thing, I recommend reading this full piece first.

The White Plane begins with Jamal El Kournayti, a caddy or something at the Army Navy Country Club on 9/11; as narrator A. Marquis puts it, “Jamal’s account gives us a strong starting point for our flight path.” This it does, by placing the plane well south of the previous accounts, which might seem ironic, since their original path was north of the official one. But this is also the only account of the four that, on its own considered merits, even seems to contradict the official path. El Kournayti's is the most specifically illustrated stretch, referenced to specific trees at either end of the range, which he says the plane flew directly over. The path and location they draw for their video is accurate to what El Kournayti describes and is the better part of a half-mile off the ‘official path,’ but with about the same heading.
So if we’re starting out well south of the North-of-Citgo path, the attack plane had to connect to PentaCon witness Edward Paik, at the west end of the Navy Annex NNE of the end of the driving range. Both men would be near the hinge points where heading changed and should have reported a turn or at least the accompanying bank. However Paik was never asked about any turn, and gave clues only indicating a straight path. Likewise El Kournayti is never asked about and never mentions any bank of the wings or turn in the flight path. His gestures indicate a straight sweep across the sky on a bearing I map out at approximately 65°. So somewhere between Jamal and Edward the plane would need to shift to the north and do all its remarkable turning, banking, and leveling; it’s clear at this point that a lot was riding on the witnesses of south Arlington who occupied that span.

Canvassing / Mrs. Hubbard
In between Jamal and Edward there were neighborhoods to screen for “additional previously unknown witnesses,” neighborhoods like the one they call 13th and Poe, which is probably what the locals call it too, since it has such an uncanny – if unlucky - ring to it. Canvassing the few long streets of this mini-borough Nestled between I-395 and Washington Blvd, south of the Navy Annex, and north of Hoffman Boston Elementary School, Ranke found it, “painfully clear that the people on the street report something different than the suspect witness accounts reported by the mainstream media.” The PentaCon’s four North-of-Citgo witnesses had their four flight paths, hand drawn over aerial images of the attack; here again we have four witnesses but oddly not a single drawn flight path among them. Craig explained to me “I didn't have images prepared for people I did not know I would randomly find from canvassing. Only for the pre-arranged interviews.” Granted, aerial long-views of every possible POV cannot be prepared, but a satellite map the witness could read relative to their view might work. Something could have, should have, been improvised to get some graphic confirmation. And wouldn’t you know it… Jamal and then at least three new witnesses found and interviewed around 13th and Poe, all supporting the logical extension of their previous groundbreaking findings we’re told, but not a pen-stroke of that good stuff to show for it.

The first witness presented after Jamal is Mrs. Hubbard, who was interviewed on the porch of her home on the west side of S Poe st just off 13th. Ranke did confirm for me that her window points on Poe street, which would offer a view to the east. Not only is there no flight path drawn by her, but no visual clues shared whatsoever; she declined to be videotaped and talks unseen, mentioning ‘numerous clues indicating some flight path:

“It came right between these two houses […] I saw the tip of it going that way [...] It came this way. It came across here. And it went between the house with the gray roof […] and the big house. It pulled up so that it would miss those trees and then the next thing I saw was the puff of smoke.”

Which houses? Which trees? I’ve scanned satellite photos for what she might mean but don’t feel comfortable settling on a path and with CIT being and helpful as they have with their verification, the best I have to go on is the facts that she saw it, and “I thought it had hit the highway,” meaning the raised curving portion of I-395 northeast of her east-facing den window. But CIT’s yellow composite squiggle passes entirely behind her house and out of view. She’s included as a witness to this path’s middle stretch, but for Mrs. Hubbard to have actually seen this path, it would have to curve at least somewhat to the east of her den window, then almost due north to the corner of the Navy Annex, complicating the required turn to the right to rendezvous with Ed Paik’s line. I think I know why they fudged it back behind her, (see below) but it’s just fudging, CIT would say, and probably not a sign that she’s a plant. She clearly, literally “saw the "tail" of the plane,” Craig explains, “headed towards Edward Paik coming from Jamal.” In reality, she never mentioned either man in her account and it’s not even clear if the three know each other.

Before we can go any further then we must revise the middle portion – to pass in front of her house, which will in turn effect the remaining two witnesses. To connect the accounts of El Kourtayni and Paik while offering Hubbard a view, it would have to fly a bit further east than CIT shows, then turn near north, a heading of about 15-20° from true north, running entirely parallel to I-395. While her directional clues are still vague, I would offer the magenta line as at least better fitted to her thinking it crashed into the freeway somewhere in the distance. This is very different from what CIT decided she saw, even once it’s adjusted to be possible.


The Cousins With A Bathroom View

Veronica (first name only) was interviewed apparently in the August 2006 elite research foray, since Russell Pickering is visible and actually doing most of the questioning. She seems to be standing on 13th street, between S Poe and S Pierce streets, facing north and away from the camera for her entire interview. The segment starts out with her pointing out the plane’s flight path, having been apparently asked about it right before. She also points about the same direction to her location at the time, her cousin’s house on the north side of the street, from a window in the back facing north. “We were at my cousin’s house over here; she’s got a window in the back ‘cause she was in the bathroom,” Veronica explained. This makes it sound as if she herself didn’t see it, but was merely passing along her cousin’s account. But the rest of her account makes it indeed seem that she herself, if unclearly, saw "the white go by." However she learned of it, she seems pretty sure of the plane’s general trajectory, her repeated arm gestures clearly indicating east-northeast, inconsistent with CIT’s yellow composite path and far inconsistent with my corrected yellow-green path from east of Mrs. Hubbard’s window. She also describes no kind of turn or associated wing bank of a plane swooping north and arcing east over the Navy Annex, repeatedly tracing a straight line across the sky, the only conclusive visual clue offered by any of the ladies of 13th and Poe that actually got through to the viewers of The White Plane.
All this is ignored by CIT, and Veronica’s account is used primarily to corroborate the plane as white, and as an introduction to her cousin, Cindy Reyes, “who got a better look at the airplane” and did an even better job with setting the color trend. Reyes showed her face and spoke candidly after letting the interviewers in to stand in her bathroom and see what her view was like, a panoramic one looking almost due north, revealing the Sheraton hotel in the distance and the Navy Annex just out of view to the northeast. Her descriptions and gestures against that window indicate a descent to what seemed treetop level. For its lateral direction, she gestures from left to right, but it’s unclear if she’s trying to indicate three-dimensional movement, or just tracing across the window pane like one might a TV screen. There is some obvious confusion in the interview about left vs. behind (her left then or their behind now?), which leaves her directional and perspective clues vague.

When challenged, CIT has refused to draw the path they think she saw on a map anywhere, so I decided to try my own from clues she freely offered. There was a predominantly left-right (west-to-east) motion, but it was not purely seen from the side but “at an angle.” I’d like to emphasize an angle, as in singular. Nowhere does she mention or is she asked about seeing any change of angle, any turn of the airplane. Whether they knew it at the time or not, this is the spot where it would have to turn sharply to a more easterly heading. And of course such a sharp turn, coming in from Mrs. Hubbard’s FoV, would require a pronounced wing bank, which she also does not mention and is not asked about.

In attempting a guess of her flight path, remember that she and Veronica supposedly saw the same thing from about the same location, and that Veronica’s gestures seemed to indicate ENE. Both paths in the graphic above agree on general distance from the window, but angle and turn are in question. This double-corroborated testimony of Cindy and Veronica seems to more strongly support the purple line, which is in fact the precise “official path” of Flight 77, or something quite similar.

Constructing the Flight Path
Among the 13th and Poe witnesses there are clearly no direct clues for the middle stretch of the yellow CIT squiggle, and in fact some serious points against it. The Citizen Investigators tacitly admit this in discussions by downplaying flight path evidence altogether. After the revolutionary flight path up north, it's all about the color and the location of - something. The issue of plane direction is clearly back-burner now:

“We KNOW that none of their accounts are perfect. […] They only need to be approximately correct. […] there is no need to determine the exact placement of the plane or a flight path at all. […] It is unreasonable to suggest that it is even possible to determine the exact placement of the plane from witness statements.” [source]

Craig in fact started a whole new thread at the new LCF in response to this piece, titled "No witness can accurately depict a flight path (The plane moved too fast)." This is a bad sign; they never admit something if there isn’t a way to twist it into appearing to support the thesis. Instead they fall back on presenting false dichotomies, like this one, that are getting falser the deeper I look:

“If you believe the official story you have to accept that virtually all of them are completely lying. […] So do you trust real people or do you trust the government? Is it more likely that they have a reasonable margin of error in their accounts or is it more likely that they are all completely lying and that the drastically different official story is true? That is pretty much your choice here.” [source - emph mine]

Clearly CIT doesn’t trust ‘their own’ people, taking the approach to flight path construction of “Draw a line from where Jamal saw the plane to where the citgo witnesses saw the plane. […] That's what we did. That is scientific, logical, and the most accurate way to interpret this data.” So long as both placements are truly accurate and there’s supporting data in between, or at least no contradictory facts, this is certainly true. Unfortunately that is not the case here.

The explanation was also a challenge; “draw a line from where Jamal saw the plane to where the citgo witnesses saw the plane. […] Think of all of their placements as being approximate and create the best estimation you can using ALL of their accounts. Go ahead, do it and show me what you come up with.” Okay so here are some versions: CIT’s scientifical yellow swerve and the ‘official’ path, more or less, in purple for reference in each: and my readings of the White Plane witnesses read with three different sets of assumptions explained on each:



”Flight 77” The White Plane”, an “extremely important “ video “revealing what the people of Arlington REALLY saw on 9/11.” Hardly. As Asshole Marquis recently asked a fellow LCF member, and as I now deflect back to them:

“Are you so sick and demented that [the Ladies of 13th and Poe] are just values in a logic equation? Do they represent actual witnesses and human beings who are scared about what they saw or are they just names and statements that you can play circle games with because you think you understand "logic"?”

THE WHITE BLUR

OF SMOKE AND MIRRORED SURFACES
February 7 2007
Last Updated 5/23/07

despite their overall poor quality as evidence (serving better as a Rorshach test for pre-existing 9/11 theories), the surveillance video stills released in 2002 can yield some screts to the patient eye. I admit that's not normally me, but I've taken a crack at it; Prime among the features that stand out is the “white blur” which inhabits the stationary background briefly – for one frame – before it disappears into a brilliant fireball on the building’s façade in the next. Passed off by the official story as proof of a plane, it has most often been interpreted not as the plane but as the vapor or smoke trail behind the plane, which is mostly hidden behind the security box in the center.

For example, “Cat Herder” at Above Top Secret, in an otherwise sterling and pivotal mega-post “9/11: A Boeing 757 struck the Pentagon” (posted mid-2004, up to more than 4,000 responses now) took this tack, seeing an oddly black plane emitting a white vapor trail. To be fair, CH did admit: “this is entirely subjective and the image quality [...] is not good enough to form a factual opinion.”

I'm sure it was addressed somewhere in the thread, but a 757 shouldn’t have a vapor or smoke trail behind it if it crosssed the Pentalawn. The normal contrail seen behind jets in the sky is a result of high altitudes, and does not happen near ground level. I didn’t know this until I learned of it from Karl Schwarz of all people, but it seems to be true anyway. Thus the vapor trail meant a missile, which burns rocket fuel that does leave a trail at sea level (although that doesn’t seem to explain an A3 Skywarrior any better than it does a 757).

Mike Wilson’s animation of the attack helps explain and visualize the source of smoke as consistent with a 757 with engine damage, proably from ingesting a light pole "luminary." But like Cat Herder, I believe he got the plane and this smoke confused in the still analysis. Again as have most others, he identified the plane as hidden behind the security box - what they show as tailfin is the same tall part of the horizon line, and what I believe is the plane is shown as the engine smoke.

Allow me to explain: there are things we can tell from these stills if we look close. The first thing is to look not just at the first still but at all five to get asense of motion. the five frames below are closely cropped on the area in question, slightly enhanced, with the fisheye effect uncorrected. I've looked for movement and stillness, measured by changes in pixels from one frame to the next. Spots that match up in frame after frame I've taken as stationary objects/background and the few that don’t I've taken as things that are moving. The plane/missile was moving, so clearly we look for pixels that change suddenly. for the moment I'm ignoring the black tailfin to simplify this stage of the analysis, but I'll get back to it shortly.

Frame One This is the key frame that supposedly shows the vapor trail - I would note the dark pixels on underside that could well be its shadow on the lawn – if a smoke trail it's pretty dense. If a 757, recall the angle of attack, and that the alleged plane was silver, and NOT in the building’s shadow yet, so it should show up brilliant white with sun beaming right on it, and possibly affected by glare to look larger.

Second frame, one second after the first. Already we can see that where the white pixels were there is now “vapor” or more likely smoke, running evenly gray up to the building. The dark green horizon line is steady in all shots – none of the darkness there is part of the craft, unless it left some black bits of itself floating behind in mid-air, now obscured by suddenly-gray smoke that had been bright white a second earlier.



Frame three:
Again this is about one second after the previous. Note the gray smoke hasn't changed much, even as the fireball evolves, rises slowly, and darkens.







Frame Four:
No significant change in color of smoke, projectiles working their way up through the cloud and emerging.






Frame Five: Same. gray smoke,expanding and darkenin explosion. the little white "nosecone" some have seen peeking out from behind the security box is still there, attached to the box.





So then lets revisit the first frame here in simplified cartoony colors – background, forground, building and shadow, check-point, and the “blur.” Looking also at the color of “smoke” in the red sample area from the five stills, we see a sudden shift from white to gray, which stays gray for the next four seconds. Clearly the white is NOT smoke, most likely the plane itself.

Not that I can't see what people think is a tailfin, and I admit the pixel change here is significant. In fact looking again I've decided I may have been wrong in blending it into the horizon, and so I'm working on clearing this up with more analysis. I'm seeing not only a remarkably sharp vertical aberration, but also a notable blue-shift in the dark horizon area that happens to correspond exactly with it. The color enhanced inset helped reveal at least some of this is apparently in the pixels themselves, appearing over the whole image, and also present in the other frame from this camera, perhaps a digital artifact (orange lines illustrate edges of rectangular areas tinetd blue and orange, respectively). We see the white emerging from the tail end as we would if the right engine were damaged. But again, this would be amazing shadow-casting white-then-gray smoke... and if the tailfin were at that location, at least by my mapping of the scene, it would be sticking out to the left of the box, probably beyond the security box lip's ability to hide it.

I had rebelled against the "black tailfin," insisting on seeing only a slight, irrelevant extension of an already high point on the skyline, but this really does look like a tailfin. When it comes to the chassis, I'd expect sunlit silver glare to dominate, and certainly not the all-black plane Cat Herder saw. But looking on the north side and as the plane was beginning its starboard bank, the visible side would be in shadow. But again, how could the whole plane, including its massive banking right wing stay hidden in that blind spot without peeking over or to the left? Is the high point the banking right wing and engine? No - the wing would catch sunlight at almost any angle but sideways, and the engine would glint at any angle. Only the tailfin can do this darkness trick, which makes the tailfin there seem possible and makes the white again seem like smoke.

In short, I'm confused again. Nonetheless...
In May 2006 the full video the stills were taken from, along with a second video from a different camera that has no such obstruction of view, was released by Judicial Watch. In this new view, besides a horrible glare and what looks like a splat of bird crap, we see the blur alone and unobstructed, if just the tip of it at far right. In this shot at least this is clearly NOT a smoke or vapor trail unless of an invisible craft, and strangely about the same color as the possible smoke recorded by cam 2. Although less of it is visible, we also see more clearly a shape to it. It looks like it's again underpinned by a shadow. Even adjusting for light distortion, this looks much bigger than a Global Hawk or other smaller craft often cited.

But the shapes do seem to fit nicely, giving us something like this, resembling a giant ghost Albatross. I can't tell you how exactly this must be a 757, nor can I see how anything else could be readily identifiable in this ill-defined cluster of optic distortions. But it's of a good size, the largest number of eyewitnesses described an AA liner, and something like a 757 seems to have damaged the building and killed nearly 200 people there within the next couple of seconds. You do the math. My best guess still, after looking at all this, is the "tailfin" is nothing more than some kind of digital "artifact" after all. But I'm still looking at it...

PENTAGON CAMERA FISHEYE CORRECTION

Well, it looks cooler but seems less useful than I thought it would. In analyzing the footage from the Pentagon's CCTV security cameras, I had been concerned with the distorting effects of the fisheye lens, the kind like on your motel room door. The cameras are designed to monitor car traffic coming into the northwest entrance, but do have a good view to the south of the large west lawn and heliport. Here is an original, uncorrected shot of a police car pulling into the gate just seconds before Flight 77 screamed across the lawn. The red lines show distortion caused by the lens.

I opened the shot in Photoshop, used an elliptical selection tool lined up with the rounded corners at the bottom, and applied the spherize filter, full inversion (-100%) and got this, again with lines to show the correction. It's not perfect, but helps some.
The rooflines still has a bit of a curve to it, so I tried anti-spherizing it again.

And clearly this isn't helping much. It also appears the effect diminishes with distance. Countering the fisheye effect on the white blur frame itself doesn't add much to our analysis except shrinking the scene some and starting to distort the plane with the edge effect. I'm not even going to bother showing separate frames for comparison - here they all are together: lowest level is uncorrected, middle layer de-spherized once, top layer done twice.